Microsoft Leaks References to 'Office Mobile for iPhone', 'Excel for iPad' and 'PowerPoint for iPad'

Building upon a series of reports about Microsoft's apparent efforts to bring its Office productivity suite to iOS, The Verge last month shared a few screenshots and noted that the suite would be offered in early 2013 as a set of free apps with viewing abilities that could be upgraded with basic editing tools through a Microsoft 360 subscription. Microsoft has, however, been rather cryptic in its public comments on the Office for iOS project, leaving a number of questions about just what the company's plans are.

As noted by Mac4ever, references to several Office for iOS applications have begun creeping into Microsoft's support site, albeit as product tags that appear to have been applied improperly to support articles.

One example is a document addressing custom numeric formats in Excel. On the support site for the United States, the document is listed as applying to Excel 2013, while on the French support site it is incorrectly listed as applying to Excel for iPad. Searches for similar phrases throughout Microsoft's support site yield a number of other references, including "Excel for iPad", "PowerPoint for iPad", and "Office Mobile for iPhone".

While the appearance of these new product tags doesn't offer any additional information on Microsoft's plans, it does seem to confirm the products' existence and that the company is working toward building out support site infrastructure for them ahead of their debut.

Yet I can't help but feel there would be a LOT of great word processor/spreadsheet/presentation applications (on all platforms) if there was better open document support that people and businesses actually use. Word compatibility in Pages was never that great for complex documents (headers, footers, TOC, etc.), Excel will never be replaced because of all those business critical VBA scripts. it's the worst kind of vendor lock in. rant over, thanks for listening.

Subscription based to edit? I'll pass. Is Office really needed these days?

The greedy monster that is Microsoft rises from the depths of the sea. Tokyo is that way!

My daughter has to have MS Office for school. She wants a laptop but I'm not willing to pay for it, if MS can release a decent version for iOS, I'll buy it and she can use it on her iPad. The $$ for the app will no doubt be cheaper than a laptop.

If it really render all the PPT files equally to desktop and keeps my beloved Pivot Table on iPad I would even pay a subscription... Because the the iPad could replace my laptop/desktop.
Today those two file types are the most used in enterprise with no real good alternative.
But: I fear Office/PPT/Excel will be quite reduced in functionality down to uselessness.

Home users probably aren't the target demographic here - and a lot of offices will already be fully tied into Office 365. If collaboration with other users is supported, this will probably relegate iWork into a niche role (more than it already is, anyway).

I'd love it if we could use iWork for this sort of thing, but Apple's cloud-based collaboration tools simply do not exist. Synching between devices is nice; but sharing with other users is a bigger deal. Having to "share" by sending documents via email to other people is a throwback to 1995 - hopefully Apple plans on remedying that soon. Heck, even tying directly into Dropbox would work... but that's not going to happen.